The 2001 AUMF Covers 2014 Counterterrorism Operations Against ISIS?

What Ben said.

I certainly can see why the executive branch would want to adopt a reading as aggressive as this one: it nips some War Powers Resolution questions in the bud, and helps to make it more likely that, going forward, talk of any additional congressional authorization can be held in best practices terms rather than legal ones.

But the statute that Congress passed in the wake of, and as a response to, the 9/11 attacks, read now so as to authorize the use of force in Iraq and Syria against ISIS--a group that al-Qaeda expelled publicly?  It seems like quite a stretch.